the twilight years

Mikey wrote a intersting post about why University Ministry can suck including;

You spend a lot of time doubling up - training and pastoring people who are already being trained and pastored by local churches. If the local churches aren't doing their job, perhaps it'd be better to tell people to move churches, rather than picking up the slack in parachurch.

Uni ministries work best when they are supported by a church with a strong uni-ministry. So why not just have the local church?

I think this is a fair point. I've always argued that Uni ministry in my experience has worked best when supported by one particular strong local church. Then the advantage of being part of a parachurch movement allows the advantage of exposing other University students to solid Christian teaching and training... but this brings with it a problem...

More time ends up be spent in training than in evangelism. An evangelistically-driven uni ministry may look very different to current AFES-style ministries.

This is also a fair point. As pointed out in the discussion over on Mikey's blog often an AFES style ministry ends up teaching and correcting mistakes of other churches instead of getting on with the business of evangelism. Having said all that I still believe very strongly in University ministry. Now what about some reasons why University ministry is awesome?

1 comments:

I'd love to have a discussion as to whether those things that Mikey listed do actually suck. I think you'd agree that carefully equipping those who are capable of being carefully equipped, and for whom it will be useful to be carefully equipped is a most worthy investment of time. But with everything, context is everything.